A funny time-capsule of a book, already dated before it's even officially released. The authors are certainly aware of the time-sensitive nature of the project, so they don't even make an attempt at timelessness or at not setting it in any particular timeframe. This is good, but I think that even in five years some of it will simply not make sense to young readers. Facebook and the internet are going to change that much.

The 1996 setting is overdone in places, with too many cultural references (I strapped my Discman to my arm with Velcro, that kind of thing), but either I got used to it or the authors let it go after a while. I'm the same age as the characters and for the most part everything seemed authentic, though Emma is more of a "now" name than a "then" name. But I'm pretty sure they missed the boat in one place, and it's kind of an obvious boat--there are a few references to DVDs being a new format. I don't think DVDs were around in 1996, certainly not enough to be used and talked about. The video stores weren't yet replacing videos with DVDs, in my recollection. A quick google search shows that apparently Evita was the first movie released on DVD, and that didn't come out in the theater until the end of 1996. Maybe someone will catch this in the ARC if it's not too late, because the references could be removed easily.

The facebook status updates from the thirtysomethings are a little stilted, I thought. And the teen readers may have zero interest in them... yeah, they're a lot like the status updates MY friends write, but they may seem funny to teenagers. But one of my favorite things is when Emma freaks out that she must be insane in the future, because only a crazy person would write that kind of stuff for the whole Internet to read.

I did keep having to let go of one thing, because really, there wouldn't have been any way around it if they were trying for veracity. Can you IMAGINE how long it would have taken to load facebook pages with a 1996 dial-up Internet connection?